First-quarter chart led by knockout Pinch
The charts covering the first quarter of 2022 are topped by last year’s Christmas Number One, while World Book Day made its mark.
In news that will surprise no regular perusers of The Bookseller’s charts pages, Pinch of Nom Comfort Food is the bestselling title of the first quarter of 2022.
Four books on from Kay Featherstone and Kate Allinson’s record-breaking début Pinch of Nom, Comfort Food is just as much of a blockbuster as its predecessors, nearing half a million copies in total, seven weeks spent atop the Official UK Top 50, and it’s managed to do something that not only no other Pinch of Nom title has achieved, but no diet book has even attempted—it hit the Christmas number one spot. In 2022 so far, it spent the majority of January in the weekly pole and has notched up a whisker under 200,000 copies sold in three months.
Colleen Hoover’s It Ends with Us scored second place for the first quarter, with 133,015 copies sold, easily thundering into the Mass-Market Fiction top spot for the period. Hoover’s rise over the past few months has been meteoric. Unlike many of the authors who have seen their titles boosted by TikTok fame, her entire backlist has been bumped upwards. Her sales for the first 12 weeks of 2022 stand at just under 360,000 copies—a hefty 27,000% higher than the first 12 weeks of 2020, and 50% of her entire volume through BookScan since 2013.
The romance author’s 2014 title Ugly Love also vacuumed up the sales in the first quarter of 2022, scoring third place, with 2021’s full-year bestseller Richard Osman’s The Thursday Murder Club settling for second. The TikTok boom may have begun last year, but it veritably exploded in the first few months of this one, with Taylor Jenkins Reid’s The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo, Ali Hazelwood’s The Love Hypothesis and Elena Armas’ The Spanish Love Deception zipping into the Mass-Market Fiction chart. Romance & Sagas is up 124% in volume compared to 2020, its best first quarter since records began.
Fantasy titles also had a stellar start to the year, with five of the 12 weeks of Original Fiction number ones coming from the genre. However, many of this year’s fantasy hits benefit from one incredible week, before dropping sharply in sales a week later. Sarah J Maas’ House of Sky and Breath, V E Schwab’s Gallant and Olivie Blake’s The Atlas Six all feature in the top 20, but couldn’t defeat the week-in, week-out consistency of Richard Osman’s The Man Who Died Twice. The cosy crime sequel shifted a total of 50,476 units, not once falling below 2,800 copies sold per week in the first three months of the year.
Marian Keyes’ Again, Rachel and Dolly Parton and James Patterson’s Run Rose Run, published in mid-February and early March respectively, rocketed into second and third place in Original Fiction. Parton’s début seemed to run straight into the hearts of the nation’s mothers, or at least to the top of the pile for Mother’s Day gifts, reigning for the weeks leading up to and following the event.
Dr Michael Mosley’s Fast 800 Keto topped the Paperback Non-fiction chart, with 61% of its total sales for the quarter achieved in January alone. It even managed to defeat Pinch of Nom Comfort Food and claim the overall top spot for the last week of the month. James Clear’s Atomic Habits and Vex King’s Good Vibes, Good Life benefited from a gentler-than-usual New Year, new you period, which shifted its focus to positivity and healthy habits rather than restrictive self-punishment (Fast 800 Keto, a low carb 800-calories-a-day regime, proving the exception to the rule).
Russia-focused political titles also climbed the charts after Putin’s invasion of Ukraine in late February, with Catherine Belton’s Putin’s People rising to the top of the weekly chart. Tim Marshall’s geopolitical duology The Power of Geography and Prisoners of Geography scored fifth and 11th place respectively in the first-quarter chart.
Though the Children’s charts of the first three months of 2022 were dominated by World Book Day, the TikTok bump for Young Adult Fiction continued, with Adam Silvera’s They Both Die at the End and Kathleen Glasgow’s Girl in Pieces in the top 20, joined by YA noirs Karen McManus’ One of Us is Lying and Holly Jackson’s A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder.
